


The Oldest Young Prodigy

by FalconFate



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: OC is based off of Rebecca Barnes who is Bucky’s little sister, She is a TEEN btw, There is brief description of throwing up btw, but not graphic, first person!!! you’ve been warned, her name is Rikki please be nice to her, i’ll try not to make it cringy, sooooooooo, tags are gonna be updated as the story is updated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 14:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13813032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FalconFate/pseuds/FalconFate
Summary: I was shoved into a cryopod in 1946 and ended up in 2014. Fortunately, I wasn’t alone: I had my brother.Unfortunately, some idiot blew his arm off.So now I have to track down the idiot, and then my idiot brother.





	1. Time is an Illusion

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn’t even sure I was gonna post this. 
> 
> BUT HEY I LIKE IT so why not.
> 
> Enjoy!

I fought and I yelled, kicking and biting and yanking at whatever I got a hold of, but these were soldiers enhanced more than I was. They gripped me by the arms, around my torso, my legs, my hair, and each and every finger burned into my consciousness, stirring up memories I struggled every day to repress. My shrieks of rage turned into wails of fear and despair, but the soldiers pressed on, bringing me steadily closer to the source of my most terrifying nightmares.

  
My voice gave out. They shoved me into a chair, strapped me in, grunting in frustration when I struggled and strained at the leather. Panic set in; my world of a steel bunker and flickering blue-white lights went dim and fuzzy, and I could hear the ocean, pulsing in time with the drum in my head, the rhythm escalating as though for an execution. I couldn’t breathe; I could taste damp metal and bleach, but I couldn’t fill my lungs.

  
They shut the door. The square of glass just big enough to frame my face quickly fogged over… and the drums slowed… and the ocean quieted… and the world finally faded to black… and I could no longer feel a thing.

* * *

  
The next moment, I heard a great, whooshing _HISSSS_ of escaping gas. I was still blind, but I could take a shaky breath, curl and stretch my trembling fingers. Hands unstrapped me from the cryopod, two of them; one seeming blazing hot, the other cool.  
The same hands caught me as I collapsed forward, and I didn’t have the strength to cringe away from them. But I heard a whisper, as loud as if he’d shouted, “Easy, Becks. I’ve got you.”

* * *

 

Hours had passed, and my hands still shook. I’d warmed enough to feel that I was cold, and I had my sight back. My brother—what was left of him, sunken-eyed and unkempt, unsure of me even though he knew who I was—had wrapped my shoulders in a rough blanket, and then another as I continued to shiver violently. There was little else he could do, so he kept me close as he continued his looting of the Hydra base.

  
It was derelict. Lights had yellowed with age in what I perceived as a matter of moments, and flickered incessantly if they turned on at all. Mold and mildew flourished in the damp corners; cobwebs and dust gathered in dryer spaces. My brother—I struggled, somehow, to remember what I called him before; even my own name was fuzzy, something with a B… or a K?—flitted between his points of interest, like he wanted to get this over with quickly.  
“W-w-what’s the–the r-rush?” I asked him through chattering teeth.

  
He blinked at me, as if surprised I could speak. But maybe that was to be expected, considering… well. “I set bombs. We still have an hour, but I want to be out of here soon.”  
I frowned. I wasn’t sure what I felt about that; I wasn’t sure what I _should_ feel about it. “D-did you—d-d-did y-you _know_ I w-was here?”  
My brother shook his head. “But I knew you when I saw you.”  
Oh.

* * *

 

We soon left. My brother helped me onto the back of his bike; I’d discarded one of the blankets, and pulled the one I had left tightly as I gripped his jacket. No helmets. _Momma would have a fit if she found out,_ I thought; it was a strange thought to have, since I barely remembered her.  
We were barely a mile away when the ground rumbled, and a pillar of ash and smoke and concrete was thrust into the sky.  
Cutting it close.

* * *

  
Hydra had used my designs in a war that I’d never known about. I discovered as much in a memorial, to the second World War, a sequel to the Great War my father had fought. The memorial statue showed a squadron of Hydra’s men on bikes—the bikes _I’d_ designed, built prototypes for _in my own garage_ —facing off against French militant troops. It was a memorial to “all those that fell defending Oradour-sur-Glane.” Or, that’s what I could translate with my rough French.

  
Oradour was a ghost town, now, left as its own memorial to the massacre. I couldn’t read all of the plaques, but Bucky—I’d finally asked what he wanted to be called, and that’s the name he gave me, and it sounded about right—told me that the village was razed and its inhabitants slaughtered to avenge the capture of a German officer.  
Hearing about it made me seethe. Hearing that it had been seventy years ago stopped me in my tracks.  
“I’ve been in that capsule for over seventy years?” I asked.

  
My brother nodded. Nausea swept over me from my feet to my throat, and I swayed on the spot. I wanted to cry. I wanted to throw up.  
I ended up doing both, stumbling to a weed patch to lose lunch from 1946.


	2. In Which I Cry. A Lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> soooooo I’m excited for Voltron on Friday! Who else is excited!
> 
> ahem sorry this is Marvel ANYWAY
> 
> Have some more Rikki. I really like this chapter.

Time began passing again. Bucky told me what he knew: that we were siblings (and that I was the youngest in our family), that shrimpy little Steve Rogers whose mom made the neighborhood’s best apple pies was an enhanced super-soldier, that seventy years had passed, that the Allies, the good guys, won the war, but Hydra had lived on, and used the two of us and others like us as weapons.

  
Not soldiers, or recruits, or even goons. We were _weapons_. Assets. Property. They called us what they liked, so long as it was unrelated to the word ‘human.’

  
Bucky found me some papers—passports, driver’s licenses, registration papers for various vehicles—and we wandered across Europe. I made some money offering my repair services to stranded people on the road (not that I didn’t first offer my assistance charitably, but I was apparently sweet enough that eleven people out of twelve wanted to give me something in return), and occasionally I did temp gigs at auto shops near our safehouses.

  
After roaming Scandinavia for a few months, and then criss-crossing most of eastern Europe, we’d settled (as much as we’d ever settled) in Romania two years after I was pulled out of cryo; two years after my brother helped make a mess of America’s capital and remembered that he was a real human being.  
We had an apartment. Dingy, and cramped, but I fixed the appliances with ease. We only had one mattress—Bucky insisted I use it, since I, out of the two of us, remembered what it was like to be a real person just a little bit more. He didn’t miss comfort because he didn’t remember it. That’s the reason he gave me, anyway.  
And then there was a day. A day like any other, a day that Bucky scribbled in his notebook, a day that I sketched in my own. A day that we both were incredibly aware of the circumstances if we were caught by anyone—Hydra or the ‘good guys’—but also a day that we both knew we had to enjoy what freedom we had.  
Our neighbor, who often hired me to fix her oven (and paid me in groceries) and even let the two of us plink around on her piano if she wanted some noise in her apartment, had given us almost all of the ingredients in her recipe for plum dumplings. She’d found out, somehow, that Bucky had memory problems (to some extent), and one of her family superstitions was that plums aided in memory.

  
Whether that was true or not, the dumplings were delicious.

  
And it was on this day that I decided that, while I set everything up and made the dough, Bucky could go out and get plums at the local market.

  
Of course, it all went to shit when he texted a terse _Get out of the apartment and get as far away as you can. Be safe._

 

This was one of those moments we’d agreed not text back. So I scooped up my bag; after a moment’s debate, I shoved the finished dough into an insulated wrap with a bag of ice, and stuffed it all into my bag as well.

  
I slipped out the door, letting it click shut just in time to hear a thud from inside the apartment—someone had come in through the window.  
Ice-water dread trickled down my sternum and settled in the pit of my stomach.

* * *

  
I found him at the underpass. His arms were raised in surrender. He caught my eye, shook his head imperceptibly.

I’d have to get the plums myself.

* * *

  
They took him to Berlin. I followed, but so far behind that I quickly lost them. I was frustrated, and I had no idea how to pick up the trail again—I was a mechanic, not a master of espionage! I’d never been taught the skills to track someone down!

  
Shaky news footage caught him, and Steve, and ten other people at a Germany airport. I still had no idea where he was headed, but I managed, somehow, by some miracle, to find where they’d been keeping him in Berlin, and sneak in.

  
High-security buildings like these really should be keeping an eye on their janitors.

* * *

  
Siberia.

  
How I _should_ have gotten there, I have no idea. But I bought some heavy winter coats and thick shirts and socks, hopped on my bike, and just drove. I was able to use snow-tire treads and build a tire frame to fit, and all I had to worry about was gas.

  
It took a week, but I found the base. It was still open; no one had bothered to shut the door when they left, I suppose.

  
And no one had bothered to clean up.

  
I found a chunk of metal in one of the lookouts. I knew what it was before I picked it up. Fury and fear and despair waged war in my chest for dominance; I had to scramble outside to lose my breakfast, this time from the modern era.

* * *

  
I hadn’t been in Brooklyn since 1941. I walked my bike down the gangplank of the ship I’d stowed away on, and stepped off the pier, and was hit with a nauseating wave of dysphoria and déjà-vu. The streets were the same, the skyline was the same, but the air smelled different, and the colors were all wrong.

  
Swallowing back bile, I let my feet carry me where they would.

  
The murky windows and honking horns whizzed around me in a sickening, noisy blur. I gripped the handles of my bike to curb their shaking.

  
Everything was brownstone. The place where my home should have been, worn but well-maintained, had been replaced by a sleek, elegant design of brick and glass.  
I held back a sob. My chest hurt. Over the past two years, I’d thought about it—my home would be someone else’s, my parents wouldn’t be around, my sisters were ancient if they were still alive—but now…

  
My home was simply _gone_. I couldn’t take the stairs two at a time and fling myself into my father’s arms; couldn’t wrap my arms around my mother; couldn’t fit myself under one or both of my sisters’ arms and press into their sides.

  
And now I couldn’t tell anyone about it, because the only family I had left had vanished off the face of the earth and left his arm in pieces in _Siberia_.

* * *

  
I found an alley and hunkered down behind a Dumpster. Bucky’d always told me to keep both eyes open, and know exactly what was going on in all of my surroundings—but _fuck that_. I hid myself between my bike and the Dumpster and hooked my ankle around the bike’s kickstand, then buried my face in my arms and started sobbing, noisily and uglily.

  
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise that someone came to see what was the matter. What _was_ a surprise, however, was the person who did so.

  
“Hey, uh… hey, you alright?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same routine; comments and kudos are loved and appreciated! An honorable mention to whomever correctly guesses the name of the person who speaks the last line. Thank you for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments and kudos are much appreciated. Thanks for reading!


End file.
